Sunday media round up, week four

Okay so I told myself I was going to do 52 of these posts just to get into the habit of writing again, but I'm only on week four and already I feel burned out. There's only going to be like one more of these tops. I think a big part of my problem is that I wait until the absolute last minute to try writing these. 

This week I watched a movie and a tv series, listened to music, read a book and watched an online lecture.

Snabba Cash: I'm a big fan of Nordic noir crime writer Jens Lapidus and his Snabba Cash ("Easy Money") Stockholm crime thrillers, so I was excited to hear that Netflix was going to take a shot at adapting the series after the 2010 movie trilogy failed to take off. The thing about Lapidus' writing is that it's hard to capture the most compelling parts on screen. The anti-hero of Easy Money was a money launderer who took us through his world in granular detail (Lapidus himself is a former criminal defence attorney who presumably has some insight into this world). 

The Netflix series is a complete reboot of the concept. Our protagonists now are an immigrant single mother looking to raise funds for her tech startup, her gang leader brother-in-law, a young white trash kid looking to make a name for himself, and a gang leader who falls in love with the mother and starts looking for a way out of his life of crime. 

What makes both the book and tv series stand out is that the protagonists all have desires that conflict with each other and the writing never lets anyone off the hook. They're always bound to clash into each other in a way that's guaranteed to devastate their lives. It ties that knot in your stomach that only the best works of fiction can.

I didn't catch it at first, but it was pointed out to me that there are some signs that this was all shot during lockdown. It's not necessarily distracting, but I did start paying attention to it. If anything though, I think it worked out in their favour because it's hard to imagine the big action sequence in episode five playing out on so big a scale in pre-pandemic times. That said, I found the aftermath of the shootout a bit disappointing, though the ending of the series is one any tv show should aspire too. 

Really the only outright disappointment in Snabba Cash was the tech billionaire character. Absurd tech exuberance has been done better elsewhere, and he never makes for a compelling antagonist (plus his meeting with one key character takes place entirely offscreen, which is a shame). It's strange too because in his writing Lapidus is great at examining class. He's got all these great characters suffering from class anxiety, with big ambitions and no way to realize them through legitimate work.

We Are Not Alone - Ellen Allien / April 10 

Tiger Girl: This is a 2017 film that I found out about after clicking aimlessly around on letterboxd for a while. A police academy dropout finds a spare security uniform for her new crustpunk friend and the two have a ton of fun taking advantage of the innate gullibility / obedience of their fellow Germans. Their casual disregard for the law is really cathartic, and the film builds tension by balancing it against questions of abuse of authority.

Halfway through the two friends essentially switch roles, with the crustpunk coming back down to earth and the dropout becoming a stolen valour type spiralling out of control and obsessed with finding police uniforms for her and her friend.

The ending fails because as much as they're able to build that tension they never want to let go of that cathartic element completely, and the movie just sort of stops rather than ends. It has the tone of those Kick Ass movies from a while back, and the action has this weird over-the-top comic quality at odds with the otherwise grounded story, but it still beats the shaky cam, blurred dust ups that have otherwise become the norm.

Viking Humour

Viking Humour: this was a fun online lecture from Dr. Hannah Burrows of the University of Aberdeen. I saw it promoted by the Medeivalists.net twitter account and was glad I checked it out. There's a big part of my pandemic novel that revolves around a joke that was used in both the Icelandic sagas and the chansons de geste. Alas, it wasn't mentioned in the lecture. Oh well. You can watch the lecture on youtube here.

Charlemagne by Johanne Fried: Finally finished reading this biography of the Frankish king. It's really great both at imagining what Charlemagne's court must have felt like and at examining the foreign relations of the Frank empire. It's the first detailed account I've read of the embassy C sent to Harun al-Rashid and it goes into great detail on the machinations of the Papacy and Byzantine Empire. It also has a great epilogue on his reputation down through the centuries, with the author sort of worried about his current fate. On the one hand, current academic practices tend to devalue one life in favour of looking at broad social trends, which is the wrong way to go with Charlemagne because he was such a singular force. On the other hand, European conservatives celebrate him as the great Christian unifier of Europe, but this isn't any better because completely at odds with how he saw himself.

Alright, that's it for this week. Hope this helps fill the content void.